- CRISPYBABY
- Dec 15, 2007
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by Reene
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Its pay-walled, you have a copy?
quote:Remember all the handwringing over Joanna Jedrzejczyk’s weight cut a few months ago? That was real. Very real. It may have been dismissed in the moment as sensationalism, another molehill for the MMA media to turn into a mountain, but the reality was in late September, as the clock ticked down on Jedrzejczyk’s top-contender bout against Michelle Waterson at UFC Tampa, the biggest question both the UFC and Jedrzejczyk’s team faced was whether the former strawweight champion would make it to her Oct. 12 date at all. And that concern started long before fight week.
It’s no secret that Jedrzejczyk has always struggled with her cut down to 115 pounds. Two years after her knockout loss to Rose Namajunas in a 2017 title defense, she still — to some degree, at least — attributes her performance to a nightmarish war she waged with the scale before UFC 217, one that forced her to shed 15 pounds in less than 14 hours. Regardless of whether you buy Jedrzejczyk’s claims, it’s evident the former UFC strawweight champion felt she was led astray during her cut — and as Jedrzejczyk will tell you, she’s the one who “paid the ultimate price.”
But what Jedrzejczyk was dealing with before UFC Tampa was different.
With a little more than two weeks before the Waterson fight, Jedrzejczyk’s body had leaned out as expected, but her weight was still stuck far above its target. No matter what she did, the number on the scale stayed too high. Dangerously high. And she couldn’t figure out why.
“I didn’t know what was going on, and I was really frustrated,” Jedrzejczyk told The Athletic. “Actually, this never happened to me (before), but I wanted to cancel the fight because I was that frustrated — because I was doing everything for the last two months, for so many weeks before that happened, and I felt like I was not getting there with my weight.”
So those around Jedrzejczyk put in an emergency call to an emergency team.
Jedrzejczyk was reluctant — and more than a little skeptical — but she was also out of options.
And yet, to the surprise of the 32-year-old vet, the call actually worked.
In a matter of weeks, Jedrzejczyk untangled the knot of her stalled weight cut, little by little, hurdle by hurdle, until the Polish contender tipped the scales at 115.5 pounds and then thrashed Waterson to stake her claim as the next challenger for the strawweight belt.
“The training was different. I was not overheating my body. I was wearing less layers. I was eating different food during fight week — and it was probably one of the easiest made cuts in my fighting career,” Jedrzejczyk said.
“And I didn’t have to jump into the hot sauna or bath. I was on weight like loving 15 hours before weigh-ins, and I felt great. I was even able to sleep a little bit.”
Now Jedrzejczyk (16-3) swears she won’t do another fight camp without the same SOS team that parachuted in to save the day for UFC Tampa. That includes for her upcoming title challenge on March 7 against reigning UFC strawweight champion Weili Zhang (20-1) at UFC 248.
And on that front, she’s not alone.
Very quietly, more than 120 UFC athletes have reached the same conclusion over the course of 2019, and that number only appears to be growing as we near 2020.
“He saved my life last time,” Jedrzejczyk said. “And I owe him a lot. He has my respect forever now.”
The “he” Jedrzejczyk suddenly swears by is a man named Clint Wattenberg.
A former NCAA All-American wrestler at Cornell University, Wattenberg is somewhat of an uncharted figure of the fight game. As the director of nutrition at the UFC Performance Institute (PI) in Las Vegas, his role has kept him largely out of the public eye. But if you tuned in to any of the UFC’s 43 events in 2019, you’ve unwittingly seen plenty of his and his team’s work.
When the PI first opened its doors in 2017, it was unclear what purpose the sprawling desert structure would even serve. The ambitious facility appeared to be a half-gym, half-science-center hybrid that inadvertently became best known as being the training hub for UFC heavyweight Francis Ngannou. In the years since, though, its role has ballooned into becoming an invaluable year-round resource for many of the fighters on the roster. And in that regard, the end of 2019 will signify the one-year mark since Wattenberg’s team embarked on its most ambitious goal to date: a war on extreme weight-cutting.
UFC executives Clint Wattenberg and Heather Linden speak to Henry Cejudo at the UFC Performance Institute. (Shaheen Al-Shatti / For The Athletic)
It was always one of the endgames for the PI. Ironically enough, Wattenberg’s interview for the job fell on March 3, 2017 — the very same morning the lightweight super-fight between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson collapsed at UFC 209 because of a botched Nurmagomedov weight cut. “Literally an hour later, we’re having a conversation with Clint, and we started, ‘Hey, we need help. The UFC needs help in this regard,'” said James Kimball, the UFC’s vice president of PI operations. “I mean, it’s no secret that there was an issue — and there still is an issue.”
Wattenberg and his staff traveled to events for nearly eight months in advisory roles before assembling the weight-management program the PI launched in full at the beginning of 2019 — the same SOS program that helped Jedrzejczyk. Now, in the span of a year, an initiative that didn’t exist in 2018 has scaled to the point where, for the final pay-per-view event of 2019 — UFC 245’s three-title extravaganza — 23 of 26 of the athletes on the card, including five of the six championship competitors, were supported in some capacity (Max Holloway was the lone exception).
From supplying weight-cutting assistance and free meals throughout an entire fight camp, to offering science-based recommendations about an athlete’s ideal weight class, Wattenberg’s team oversaw a dramatic shift in the weight-management space in 2019.
“One of our main (key performance indicators) is how many fights we have saved falling off due to the PI’s intervention,” Kimball said. “And that could be weight-related or injury-related. It’s one of the two. With the numbers — 31, since we’ve opened doors that we can categorically say, due to our intervention in some capacity, largely due to weight-related issues, that we’ve saved a fight from falling off. And there have been several main and co-main events.
“And these are issues that, you know, a week out, two weeks out, three weeks out, we were told, ‘This athlete is not going to compete.’ And that maybe came from an athlete or from a coach or from our executive team. ‘Hey you guys need to dive in to figure something out here. How do we do this?’ We always get these kinds of red-flag cases. That’s what we’re here to do. And we’ve had some success in it, so it’s been rewarding thus far.”
Jedrzejczyk’s initial hesitance to work with Wattenberg’s team was understandable, and not uncommon. Because she’d been burned before. Most fighters have.
With the abundance of disinformation and pseudoscience that pollutes the MMA space, Jedrzejczyk is far from the only fighter to shell out extravagant sums of money to people who promised to make her weight cuts easier, only for everything to blow up in her face. It’s an aspect of the sport that is challenging for a lot athletes to understand, especially young athletes with few resources.
Like Maycee Barber.
At just 21, with knockout finishes in all three of her UFC fights, Barber is a perfect example of the next generation of MMA athlete. She’s an undefeated flyweight with grand ambitions of breaking Jon Jones’ record as the youngest UFC champion in history.
But those dreams were very nearly crushed before they began.
When Barber made her UFC debut in November 2018, she did so as a strawweight. And unbeknownst to her, at the age of 20, her body was already fundamentally broken.
“I used to walk around at like 136 pounds, and unfortunately I trusted my nutrition and diet to someone who was not very educated — and she put me on an extreme calorie deficit of 500 to 800 calories (per day) for fight camps,” Barber said. “So I was doing 10 weeks, and I was training four times a day and (ingesting) too low of calories. So it kind of really wrecked my metabolism and my system as a growing female. And so, just over time, my body just started to resist the cut. And I came into the UFC, I had a water cut — and that was a hard cut. I started fight week at 132, I think.
“I was blacking out, and I was having a hard, hard cut.”
In what would ultimately be her final descent to 115 pounds, Barber very nearly missed weight for her promotional debut, needing an extra hour just to get down to the strawweight limit.
And it almost killed her.
After an eventual TKO victory over Hannah Cifers, Barber’s team sensed something was wrong. Extremely wrong. No athlete as young as her should be dealing with so many physical issues so early in her career. So following her win, the UFC flew Barber to Las Vegas. The fighter spent several days at the PI, undergoing a litany of nutritional and diagnostic tests. And what she discovered made all the sense in the world.
“My numbers came back very, very poorly,” Barber said.
“She was willing to really go through anything that she needed to do — and that can work against you in certain situations,” Wattenberg said. “And she ended up experiencing some really extensive and classic symptoms of underfeeding for sport. Traditionally it’s been called the female athlete triad. It’s kind of newly been recognized as relative energy deficit for sport, where the body just really is in a famished and malnourished state and starts to cut back on its capacity to repair things, or to support the normal biological functions of a human being.”
“Before that, I had lost my period for two years,” Barber said. “So just talking with Clint, he was like, ‘We’ve got to really start fixing your body and rebuilding it from the inside out.’ And so we just kind of trusted it. And within the first month, month and a half, I got my period back. And it’s still been a little bit irregular because, you know, I cut weight still. But I haven’t lost it completely since starting working with them. So overall, that in itself has been one of the biggest impacts on my life, because at some point I would like to have a family and I would like to know that my body is functioning properly someday, to be able to do that.”
Wattenberg and his team recommended a move up to flyweight along with a battery of lifestyle changes that could begin to heal the damage that had already been done.
In her second fight after a move up to flyweight, Maycee Barber knocked out Gillian Robertson in October. (Chris Unger / Zuffa)
Since that decision, Barber has made a point of flying out to the PI every five to six weeks to continue monitoring her progress, often on the UFC’s dime. There have been hurdles, and her body is still in a “very fragile” state, but Barber says she feels miles ahead of where she stood just a year prior. And she shudders to think about what would’ve happened had she continued making her stubborn cuts down to 115 pounds.
“She’s 21 and has a whole career ahead of her,” Wattenberg said. “We have to keep that long view in mind so that it’s not just about winning the next three fights from her perspective and fighting for a title; it’s about being able to do this past the age of 25.”
“The fact that I’m 21 years old and this is the beginning of my career, and I’m this broken? I can’t imagine not having someone tell me, ‘Hey, you’re this broken,’ and me just trying to push through that,” Barber explained. “I think I would have suffered a lot more injuries. I would have suffered a lot more setbacks, even next year or the year later, if I hadn’t had someone to help me figure this out. So I think we were more excited and feeling more blessed that someone sat me down and was like, ‘All right, you’re broken. We really need to fix this.’ And it’s still a process. We’re still working on it. I was at the PI yesterday, so it’s an ongoing process.”
Barber is far from an isolated case. Wattenberg and the PI staff are quick to note that they don’t make decisions about weight cuts or weight classes for athletes. They exist only to help an athlete make the most informed decision possible. And over the past 18 months, there have been several instances that mirror Barber’s of fighters finding success in a new division with help from Las Vegas. Light heavyweight title challengers Anthony Smith and Thiago Santos are a few of the biggest success stories, as are veteran contenders Jared Cannonier and Michael Chiesa.
“When I decided to move up,” Chiesa said, “they were just very instrumental in that whole process.”
After long being an enormous lightweight, to the point he was almost comically oversized for the division, Chiesa reached his breaking point in late 2018 after the first failed weight cut of his career.
Much like Barber, his body had become fundamentally broken. He needed to fix it. And just as importantly, he needed to know that he was making the right decision — that he could actually be competitive at 170 pounds. And that’s where the PI came into play.
“A lot of the reasons why athletes want to fight at a certain weight class, which is maybe too light is, ‘Well, you know, I’m bigger. I’m bigger, and I’m stronger than them,'” Kimball said. “Well, you know, you also might be bigger and stronger than a majority of the athletes at that higher weight class. So why cut weight to where it becomes a detriment?’
“We can take an athlete’s results across a battery of tests around strength and conditioning, and compare them anonymously through highs and averages across divisions. So we can take a lightweight, and if they’re considering a move up to 170, we can show them how their power profile translates to 170. And if you’re at a higher percentage and you’re still in the 90th percentile, why would you not then consider fighting at 170 rather than just 155?”
Chiesa’s metrics showed that not only would the longtime lightweight still be physically competitive among the sharks at 170 pounds but also that his skeletal structure was big enough to where 158 pounds was the bare minimum he could conceivably cut to before his body reached its emergency state.
In other words, Chiesa’s worsening ability to make 155 pounds was physical in nature, rather than merely being an issue of dedication or an unwillingness to push through the pain.
“It’s not me being just a pussy — and that’s definitely comforting,” Chiesa said.
“I’m a grappler. (I always thought) I needed to be a big lightweight — I’ve just got to get through the tough weight cut. Like, mental toughness is my strong point. We got this. And I started to learn that (toughness) still is one of my best attributes, but it also can work against me. I learned the hard way in 2018. I was cutting down to like the absolute (minimum). I’m just surprised I never ended up at a hospital, really. … If I truly was a 155-pounder and I just had problems with my diet and being a loving fat foodie pile of poo poo between fights, they would tell me. And they were just flat out like, ‘Yeah, dude. You are so in the wrong weight class.'”
Since then, Chiesa says he’s worked closely together with Wattenberg’s team to reengineer his physical tools into a more formidable force at 170 pounds. And thus far, the transformation appears to be wildly successful. Chiesa (16-4) is already 2-0 at his new weight class and has a marquee fight against ex-champ Rafael dos Anjos (29-12) lined up for next month at UFC Raleigh. “I started finally filling out — and I think that I was holding myself back from, like, a late growth spurt almost,” Chiesa said. “Like, at this point, I’m almost thinking 185 when I hit my mid 30s. poo poo, I mean, I’m walking around — I’m 200 pounds in shape right now. I’d get to 200 at 155, and I would just have these skinny legs.
“Now they’ve made me what I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve always wanted to be an athlete — and I didn’t feel like an athlete at 155. I feel like an athlete now, and it’s a good feeling.”
The transformations go both ways, as well. Because in 2019, perhaps no fighter found vindication at a lighter weight class more than Jared Cannonier.
After beginning his UFC career as a heavyweight, then transitioning down to 205 pounds, Cannonier began exploring a further move down to middleweight in the summer of 2018, after two straight losses cemented his place outside of the light heavyweight elite. So Cannonier’s manager did exactly what Barber and Chiesa’s did, and he pointed his fighter to Las Vegas. And after undergoing the same tests to determine his body’s capabilities and whether his natural gifts would translate to 185 pounds, Cannonier left the desert even more confident in his decision.
“It’s like getting a professional seal of approval, you know?” he said.
Cannonier and Wattenberg ended up working together on-site in New York at UFC 230 as the former heavyweight made his descent down to 185 pounds for the first time. The two met every day of fight week, with Wattenberg supplying meals and a diet plan free of charge. Cannonier took advantage — and ultimately he stunned David Branch with a second-round knockout, emerging overnight as one of the breakout contenders of the middleweight division.
Now, in all likelihood as he enters 2020, Cannonier (13-4) is one March 7 win over former middleweight champion Robert Whittaker (20-5) away from challenging for a title. It’s a far cry away from where he was as a struggling light heavyweight contender in 2018.
As much as weight-cutting has been a central focus of Wattenberg’s team’s mission, of the seven different fighters The Athletic spoke to for this story, the most impactful change felt by all of them in 2019 was unanimous — and it was precisely what Wattenberg did with Cannonier in New York.
Because for the first time ever, this past year, the PI was able to supply entire fight camps worth of healthy meals to any interested athletes through the UFC’s partner Trifecta Nutrition, all free of charge.
It’s a service that steadily increased in usage in 2019 as word of mouth spread — and there isn’t much of a catch. At a fighter’s request, Wattenberg’s team will piece together an individualized diet plan and send out enough free nutritious meals to cover an entire eight- to 12-week training camp. It saves athletes countless dollars on food expenses and gives Wattenberg a simplified, direct line with which to guide some of UFC’s biggest red-flag cases through their difficult weight descents.
“It’s one less thing to worry about,” UFC welterweight champion Kamaru Usman said. The promotion’s reigning 170-pound king has used the PI’s meal service for each of his past three wins, including his breakout victory over Tyron Woodley and his star-making title defense over Colby Covington at UFC 245. And he intends to continue doing so in 2020.
“Working with them, we mapped out a plan,” Usman said. “We mapped out a plan right before camp even started. I let him know what I need. And this is a big thing that differs from what I was doing before with the couple guys that I’ve used. Clint is really good at knowing my body. Knowing what fuels my body. Because we come from similar backgrounds (as collegiate wrestlers), so he has the knowledge of how I work, how diligently I work and how hard I work. So by knowing that, Clint is able to tell me that, ‘OK, knowing you and what your body is, you’re leaner than most guys. So by you being leaner than most guys, you’re going to need to intake maybe a little bit more fat, or maybe more protein and things like that,’ as opposed to the guys that just kind of have one plan and expect everybody to fit into that one plan.
“So it might be a month into camp, I’m feeling a little tired or getting a little bit more fatigued, and then we adjust it — to where I can call him and say, ‘Hey, this is what I’m feeling through this.’ And then he’s able to tell me, ‘You know what? How about you increase the carbohydrates, or you increase this for energy, or this for your fat sources?'”
UFC welterweight champ Kamaru Usman looked in peak form for a recent title defense over Colby Covington. He said the UFC PI deserves some of the credit. (Jeff Bottari / Zuffa)
Between the combination of free meals and free weight-cutting guidance, especially on fight weeks, Usman says he’s saved “quite a bit of money” every camp he’s utilized Wattenberg’s team.
Jedrzejczyk is even willing to go further than that.
“After I lost to Rose, (nutritionist) George Lockhart asked me to pay him $6,000,” she said. “I said, ‘poo poo, that’s expensive.’ And I was like, ‘I heard you’re good. I’ll pay you this money, but you must help me to make weight.’ And you know what? It was not worth it. Because I don’t want to take anything from him, but I did it almost on my own, you know? And so the next camp, I used them (again), and they charged me $1,200. I was like, ‘So what was the difference?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, because it was a championship fight.’ And I was like, ‘But you’re not giving me different food? You’re not giving me loving caviar from Russia, you know what I mean? So why was it different?’ ‘Oh, just because. There are people who pay more, like Conor (McGregor).’ I don’t care about Conor. I love him, but I don’t care about him. I care about myself, you know?
“And so having them for free, when (the PI) sends me food, clean supplements — I was like, ‘Holy moly, is it really for free?’ Like, I couldn’t believe it. That’s amazing. I remember that when I started fighting for the UFC, it was my first time making 115 (pounds), and I remember how much money I was spending on diet, supplements, all the tests. Like, tons of money. Tons of money. Thousands and thousands.
“I’m probably going to retire soon, you know? But I’m happy for the next generation of fighters, because they can have a really better life.”
All of this is still a work in progress. Wattenberg and Kimball will be the first to admit that.
If nothing else, 2019 was a trial run.
But their program seems to have already found legs. Just 2 percent of all weigh-in attempts by UFC athletes in 2019 ended in misses, down from 4.3 percent in 2016. In total, an average of 16 athletes per UFC fight card engaged with Wattenberg and his staff in some capacity in 2019, with UFC 245 setting the record for the highest engagement percentage. To further extrapolate those numbers, of the 127 athletes to take advantage of the PI’s fight camp and fight week meal programs in 2019, all but one of them made weight. In fact, 20 athletes with histories of botched weight cuts successfully made weight.
Within a span of just 12 months, enough fighters, coaches, and managers have embraced the PI’s work to the point it has seemingly become one of the best-kept secrets in the industry.
And for Wattenberg and his team, this past year was only the beginning.
“I would compare it to training at home would be like training like Rocky,” UFC bantamweight Cody Stamman said. “But coming here? You’re training like the Russians.”
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Dec 29, 2019 04:02
